Healthy at Last!

06/20/11

Today was the first day of my trip in Brazil that I was actually healthy. I still have the sniffles and my throat is only slightly irritated, but I am doing great. I felt God directing me to fast today, so I did and I spent a great amount of time in His presence. I prayed a lot for India today through Operation World.
After prayer I was going to go to Recanto das Minas Gerais again to visit my nine guys from the YFC camp. Unfortunately, however, I wasn’t able to reach any of them except Betinho and Alexander. Alexander is on vacation and is with his aunt in another city for a week and Betinho was very sick. So my plan to meet with them again today fell through. On Sunday, I had talked to the leader of Projeto Amar (Project Love) and she had said that she was going to pick me up this morning to take me to their ministry site. However, she never showed up today, so I gave her a call in the afternoon. We scheduled for me to come to the project tomorrow afternoon.
Thus, I decided to hit the streets and preach the Gospel. I ended up leaving around 3:30 or so and I preached almost until 8 p.m. I went to the Praca Universitaria (University Plaza) because there are several universities there and many youth who hang out there.
Once I arrived there I was somewhat intimidated because there was a good amount of young people there, but all of them were in groups. I always like to approach one or two people at a time when I evangelize, especially when I am first starting out in the day. I prayed and listened to some worship music on my IPOD to gain some strength and then I went up to a group of four college guys. I had no idea how I was going to start the conversation, but God gave me the words and it went really well. They were extremely open and honest with me.
They were all nominal Catholics and they all claimed to be saved, pray daily, and live good lives. However, when I asked them if they followed Jesus with all of their hearts they all admitted that they don’t follow Him at all. One of them started preaching to the rest that it isn’t right for them to just believe in God, but not follow Jesus. It was great! I asked them why Jesus died on the cross and three of them had no clue. One of them gave a surprisingly good response. He said, “He died to set us free. So that we could be forgiven of our sins and be free.”
I shared the full Gospel message with them and challenged them to truly love and follow God not just with their lips, but with their lives. They were extremely convicted and listened reverently to everything I said. They weren’t ready to give their lives to Jesus on the spot, but they did allow me to pray for them. I passionately prayed for them and then let them go. It was awesome!
Also, the fact that I’m American and was born and raised in the United States really fascinated them and they asked me a bunch of questions about the U.S. It was a great ice breaker. In fact, the opening line I used today was, “Hey what’s up you guys! How you guys doing? My name is Joshua. I’m from the United States and I’m just visiting Goiania and I’m talking with the people here encouraging them to have a deeper relationship with God.” I found that when I introduce myself in this manner people are immediately fascinated with me being from the U.S., they like my accent, and they listen with a lot more respect. Also, they’re always impressed with my Portuguese until I tell them that my parents are Brazilian. Yet it’s good to tell them I am American because then they have a lot more patience with my slower pace of talking, grammatical errors, and accent.
Afterwards, I went up to two guys a Pitch-dog. A pitch-dog is a Goianian phenomenon. They’re essentially outdoor hamburger joints, but they’re super amazing. They sell burgers with filet mignon meat and you could order crazy things like eggs, corn, potato chips, sausage, ham, etc. to go inside your burger. They also have the best smoothies ever!!!
So I met Eliezer and another guys who had a really difficult name to remember. That’s another thing about Brazil. They names here are so different and hard to pronounce, so it’s really hard to remember people’s names. So I preached the Gospel to them and it turned out that Eliezer had just been radically saved about a month ago at Videira. He was in love with Jesus, faithfully attending a cell group, and soon to go to an encounter. He told me all about his life and his walk with the Lord now. He seemed like he had been a Christian for at least a year because of his maturity. The other guy goes to an Assemblies of God church with his mom, but he is not as committed.
Then a girl overheard our conversation and she joined us. She is also from Videira and has been saved for four months now. She was on fire for the Lord and was about to start school of leaders in order to open up her own cell group and she started encouraging Eliezer to go through School of Leaders. She told us her testimony of how she grew up in an orphanage all of her life and just two years ago her biological mother decided to take her back because the government was going to take her stipend away for having a daughter.
We talked for at least an hour and by the time we ended it was already getting dark. There was one big group left of about 18 young people hanging out together at a bench. I was going to go up to them, but I hesitated because I was somewhat intimidated. I prayed some to gain strength, but once I was going to approach them a drumline from one of the colleges arrived at the plaza and began playing. They were super amazing, but they were so loud that it was difficult to have a conversation just with one person let alone 18 people. Also, most of the young people left once the drum line started.
So I decided to just enjoy the drumline for a bit because it was definitely a worthwhile cultural experience. I enjoyed hearing them for about thirty minutes and eventually people started sitting on benches close by to listen to the group. Evantually, there were two drumline groups from different colleges playing completely different songs at the same time and they were only about 100 feet apart from each other. It was pretty impressive.
I sat next to a cool looking young guy who was nearby and we started talking. Wt chit chatted at first and then I brought in Jesus to the conversation. From then on we began our conversation about God, Jesus, and eternal life, but he a humanist who didn’t believe in religion. He only believed in humanity and saving the planet. He expressed to me his anger with the church for exploiting people for their money and for their sound pollution. It was an interesting conversation, but it didn’t really go anywhere because every time I said something about God he would say something against the church and for the environment and also it was very loud being in between to drumlins.
Around 7:30 p.m. I decided to go home and I arrived at home around 7:50 p.m. I was going to go to the Gideons meeting with Vovo, but then Andre told me that tonight was the follow up YFC (Youth for Christ) meeting for the camp we had two weekends ago. So I went with Andre to the YFC meeting.
The meeting was really great. We read several of the letters that the kids wrote back to the YFC staff and it was really funny because more than half of the letters mentioned how awesome I was as a camp leader. It became the joke of the meeting that I was the most liked person of the camp. We talked about following up with the students and gave suggestions with how we can make the camp better for next time. Then we had some bangin’ food to break my fast.